About This Story

Before the rainbow, there was a garden. Before the garden, there was a dark sea. And between that first darkness and the bow in the cloud lie the making of the world, a broken trust, two brothers, the long lives of their children's children, and a flood that carried one family through to a new beginning.

The first nine chapters of Genesis are the foundation of this telling. Around them are gathered other voices that have kept this story company for a very long time: the ancient Jewish books of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, the retellings of the historian Josephus, and the reflections of Jewish and Christian readers across the centuries. From them come things Genesis does not say: the names of wives whom Genesis leaves unnamed, the oath of the Watchers on Mount Hermon, the shining child who became Noah, and many of the pictures through which people have imagined the first world.

These voices do not always agree, and not every tradition gives them the same weight. Enoch and Jubilees are Scripture in some churches and stand outside the Bible in others. A commentator's reflection is a different thing again. This book draws them into a single story, choosing one path where their accounts part ways; the notes at the back mark those choices and keep the other paths in view.

The events and the named characters all come from that body of writing. The way they are told here does not. The language, the similes, the pacing, and much of what a scene looks and sounds and smells like belong to this retelling. Dialogue is often paraphrased, and a single scene may gather details from more than one source. So please do not read it as a translation of Genesis, or as a claim that every gesture and image is written down in an ancient text.

The calendar, too, follows chosen traditions. The ages and dates of Genesis are joined, here and there, by dates from Jubilees and by the chronology James Ussher worked out in the seventeenth century. They are part of the telling's frame, not independent proof of when these things happened.

The sources wait at the back of the book. The story begins before there was anyone to write it down.